**The problem is that you're calling `TTF_OpenFont` every frame, and you only need to load a font once.** `TTF_OpenFont` is a very intensive function that unsurprisingly uses a lot of memory, because it's only designed for one use. It would be a good idea to read the documentation for more on how it's intended to be used. ([Documentation link.][1]) The best approach here is to save your fonts somewhere as a field and only open them once at the initialization stage of your program, and then pass that font to your rendering functions each time you want to draw a text box with that font on the screen. Like this: TTF_Font* Font = TTF_OpenFont("Arial.ttf", 18); And then when you need to use it to create a text surface object for rendering (`SDL_Surface`), you can simply pass in the initialized font object. SDL_Surface* Surface = TTF_RenderText_Blended_Wrapped(Font...); You'll also need to call `TTF_CloseFont` in your destructor to free up the memory when the font is no longer needed, depending on how you've implemented all of this. [1]: https://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_ttf/docs/SDL_ttf_14.html